


Penance (Or: A Long Goodbye)

by Kanthia



Category: Leverage
Genre: F/M, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-26
Updated: 2015-10-26
Packaged: 2018-04-28 07:22:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,525
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5082862
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kanthia/pseuds/Kanthia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eliot narrows his eyes. “It won’t be over.” Hardison knows, of course. “Not for a long time.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Penance (Or: A Long Goodbye)

It ends, of course, exactly the way it began: the team’s gathered in a little apartment talking about revenge. Already Hardison’s seventy hours behind on sleep. He’s been trolling the Deep Web looking for somewhere safe enough to drop the Black Book, where the hackers and the thieves will get to it before the feds. (Hell yeah the good guys are on their asses -- Sterling could only get them so much of a head start.) Parker’s learning about contingencies and is pushing to break into Google’s servers to hard-wire a security exception.

“Well, that’s everything,” Nate says, tucking a crayon drawing into his luggage. He doesn’t have much; Sterling was right after all. “We’ll be in touch.”

“Don’t do anything Nate would do,” Sophie (Sophie?) says.

Hardison smirks, from behind a screen, taking ghost sips of an empty bottle. “We’re about to wreck havoc on the world. Fire, brimstone, rich jerks caught with their pants down. Sounds just like something Nate would do.”

“We’ll, ah,” Sophie tucks her arm around Nate’s waist. “We’ll be in Tokyo, when it happens. I’ve always wanted to be a citizen tourist in Tokyo.”

Three days til the Black Book drops and they sync their watches. Nate and Sophie make their farewells. And that’s that.

* * *

It took Eliot years to put a word to it: at first he thought it was just him being good at his job, and hell yeah he was good at his job, but the creeping numbness, the stark emptiness, and the deep, deep well at the bottom of it all, it wasn’t right. Sophie had pointed it out -- looked him right in the eye in the airport as they were waiting for their flight out of San Lorenzo and said, in her Sophie kind of way, _this isn’t normal sadness, Eliot, it’s grief_.

He’d lashed out at her, but she was right, damn her. Sophie could look you in the eye and figure out every one of your smallest fears, turn them into your worst nightmares. She’d never done that to anyone on the team -- not after they’d bungled the first David job so magnificently -- but there’d been a night when it had all been too much, and he’d found himself on the couch in the living room, his head in her lap, as she’d told him it was all worth living through...

 _Traumatic stress disorders don’t go away just because you don’t want to think about life with them_ , Nate had said that same night, over coffee and pool. They’d just pulled off a huge con, exposed a private paramilitary force that had been running a child prostitution ring. Eliot had snapped, blown his cover while speaking with the guy in charge, and almost ruined the whole thing. _Having people to care about isn’t enough. You have to care about yourself, or one day you might snap back even worse than before_.

 _You gave me something to live for_ , Eliot had returned, and he’d meant it. 

* * *

Two days. They eat a tired breakfast in a sleepy little IHOP by the side of the road, Lucille parked like you might park the family minivan on a vacation. The task dawns on them like the remains of the day; they’re in the Dalles for a reason. Wouldn’t you know Google has a server right in Oregon -- wouldn’t put it past Nate to have thought of that. Parker is right, although Hardison doesn’t like it. Feels like cheating. He snaps to attention.

They’re not sure if the Google guys know, so they play it safe, just in case. Rumours are already abound on the web that something serious got stolen from an Interpol headquarters in Portland. Pirate Bay’s on standby. 4Chan’s spreading conspiracy theories about Hardison and Mason. Archive of Our Own has a ship tag, ‘Chaos Theory’. Hardison’s been working on their identities for too many of those seventy hours, trying to spin this press into a wild and unbelievable story; if anyone knows how to smell a fake on the Web, it’s Google.

They all seem a little nervous, the skeleton security crew, but Parker uses that to her advantage -- a little trick she picked up from Sophie. She’s becoming dangerous, really dangerous. Reminds Eliot of the grifters he met in Beijing back in the day, the kinds of people who knew that if they slipped up even in the slightest they’d disappear in the middle of the night. Hardison, to his credit, doesn’t pause to admire the view when they step into the immense series of pipes through which the internet flows.

Parker pulls out a soldering iron.

“Show me where to go, Hardison,” she whispers.  
  
Eliot stands guard. The sound of wires being superheated seems to thunder in his ears.

 _You ford a river_ , he thinks, as someone turns the corner. The gait suggests a local hire, someone just getting used to the work, and he feels a little sorry for them. High heels, too. Probably an intern trying her best to make headway in a world too cruel to make room for her. He exhales, makes five precise steps, and gently presses on a pressure point on her neck. _You decide one day that you’re not going to allow the river to rule your life, and you find the closest shallow bank, and you cross it_. She’ll sleep easy.

There’s a creature in him, a beast that’s lived in the woods for centuries, moss-covered and weathered; Eliot feels old in ways he can’t describe.

“Damn wifi cutting in and out,” Hardison murmurs in Lucille on the way back to Portland, touch-typing on three different devices. It’s not enough, it’s not enough, it’s four in the morning and he’s visibly exhausted. “The book has enough on it to tide me over offline til we get back. Eliot, you wouldn’t believe --”

“Sleep, you idiot,” Eliot says, keeping his eyes on the road.  
  
“I’ll sleep when it’s over.”  
  
Eliot narrows his eyes. “It won’t be over.” Hardison knows, of course. “Not for a long time.”

He sleeps, eventually. Eliot makes sure of it. Closes the computers with a free hand, gently, as Hardison slumps onto his shoulder. He looks so powerless when he’s asleep, so tired and so fragile. Those same fingers now relaxed in sleep could wipe out your bank account, or fix an election, or stop a jammed plane from crashing into a freeway. Yeah, Eliot can kill a guy on a bad day, but Hardison can make it as though someone never existed.

In the rear-view mirror he catches Parker watching them, a measured expression on her face. Eliot puts a finger to his lips and her features soften into a little smile. Three people in a van in the middle of the night, heading home after a day’s work. Too many stars in the sky. This is alright.

* * *

“A network’s like a person,” Hardison mumbles, mostly asleep. “A computer’s like a cell. Figure out what makes it tick, and hit it where it’s weak. You can go to Japan, stand on that bridge in Akihabara, and I can go to a bunker in Serbia. Just gotta sift through kipple. We made a whole ‘nother world in our brains. Got the whole world in our phones. Hackers ‘r just savvy travellers.”

There’d been this job at a summer camp in the middle of nowhere where they’d been off the grid for six days, and you’d think Hardison was quitting smoking. Back before he really believed all that _age of the geek_ crap Eliot had thought him just another kid who’d watched too much TV when he was young -- the types that newspaper articles always said were screwed as a generation -- but once he’d seen what Hardison was really capable of, it all made sense. It was like taking his arms, or his eyes. You don’t do that to people without them feeling lost.

* * *

Alan Scott’s body is recovered, eventually. He’s buried in a tasteful but rushed little ceremony, for fear of Drexel doing something drastic even from prison. Karen’s found peace; she’s moving on, thanks to the kindness of strangers.

Her phone rings. There’s a kid on the other end. “Olivia,” the voice says. “Don’t ask how I got this number. Listen, the team that helped you is about to do something big, and you might be in danger when it happens. You never know what the rich and powerful will do for revenge, yeah? Go visit someone and lay low for a week. Maybe a month. Maybe a year.”

“How did you --” Nothing but a dial tone.

* * *

One day to go and Hardison showers, reluctantly. His files are compiling, numbers crunching themselves. Parker goes over files, deciding who to hit first, for the most dangerous of them will need to be hit before they can realize what’s happening and shore up their defenses. Eliot makes a bacon and leek quiche. It’s all kind of pathetically domestic: the sound of water running, a knife against a cutting board, Parker’s face pinched in concentration, fingers flying over the keyboard as though she’s doing her taxes the day before they’re due.

“Eliot,” she says, quietly, “A lot of people are going to get hurt.”

He quiets his knife. “We all went into this knowing that, Parker.”

“But, you know, I was thinking --” Her fingers stop moving, too. Ten digits each more deadly than a knife. “These men did bad things, terrible things, but what if -- well, what if what we’re going to do to them back --”

“-- What if two wrongs don’t make a right.”

She slumps forward. “Yeah.”

He slips around the counter, sits beside her. “That’s why it’s you, Parker. That’s why it’s not me or Hardison, or even Nate anymore. You think about consequences. It’s going to be a long ride, and we’ll need that moral compass of yours,” he points to her heart, “Right there. But you remember what Nate said. These guys broke the world, and they need to know that they can’t keep secrets like that from the world’s greatest thief. It’s not an extra wrong. It’s not even revenge anymore. It’s -- it’s bringing things into the light. Giving justice a chance. Penance.”

* * *

Ask the old Parker and she would have said, _the world broke me, so I broke the world back_.

But this isn’t the old Parker anymore.

“I used to know myself but not the world,” she says, inside Hardison’s embrace. Parker likes it in there. She likes warm, tight spaces, the feeling of safety, or of being loved. A place and a reason to rest. “Now I know a little bit about the world and nothing about myself at all.”

“That’s all right,” he says. “We’ll be all right.”

* * *

“Thirty minutes,” Parker whispers. This is it. Everything’s in place; Plans A through L are in motion. Hardison hard-wires the six separate copies of the book to six separate computers and synchronises them, ready to pounce. There’s a seventh zip-tied onto the Google server, and a decoy hidden in the basement of their old Portland home.

The sound of a door breaking in. Shouts from the pub; Amy’s performing her part in the play, stalling the feds. It’s all coming in through a feed. They’ll make their way upstairs only to find a cement wall where the door leading into the apartment used to be, and if they cross that, a startlingly empty former home.

“I don’t like this,” Maggie says. She’s getting married soon, expecting a child, and not sure how she feels about convicted (well, ex-convicted -- Vance came through in the end, just like he said he would) criminals about to unleash doomsday from her hotel room, booked under Ian Blackpoole. Nate insisted on getting Maggie to them; never trust a rich person with their back to the wall to leave the good guy unharmed.

“We’re making a better world for him,” Eliot says, standing by the door.  
  
“Her,” Maggie says. “I was thinking of Samantha.”

* * *

On the rooftop of the IYS building Nathan Ford and James Sterling share four fingers of fine Irish whiskey and talk about chasing art thieves, and maybe it’s fifteen years ago and Nate’s thinking of proposing to his girlfriend -- partner -- the love of his life. He loves her madly, and wants a family with her. Things are looking bright. Everything is in motion.

“I always wondered,” Sterling says, swishing the liquid in his glass in a slow, deliberate circle, always the more calculating of the two, “Why exactly was it that you left the seminary?”

“I was looking for penance,” Nate says, “And I think I found it.”

And nobody knows where time will take you. 

* * *

So how about this: you take three criminals and an honest man, you put them in a warehouse, and you rig it to blow. All of them hurt beyond measure even before the bomb started ticking. Then you add a world where nothing is fair and only the cruel survive, and you teach them that revenge is a thing worth seeking. There’s always a back door, if you’re willing to take the time to find it.

“It’s like that scene in _Fight Club_ ,” Hardison murmurs, as the clock ticks through the last minute. “You know, Helena Bonham Carter goes up to Edward Norton and the city’s falling down, all those debt collectors…” He’s stroking Parker’s hair, and Parker’s lying with her head in his lap playing _Candy Crush_ on her phone, and her legs are draped over Eliot’s lap, as he mixes up a damn fine bruschetta.

“I’ve seen that movie,” Eliot says. It hits a little close to home these days, but he’ll deal.

The clock hits zero. The feds have found the decoy, just in time; too late. Hardison swears he can feel that information move, and pulls up a web page that looks like a black square with a white dot in the middle. Slowly, slowly, it grows nodes of light that spread out, stars into a galaxy.

“There it goes,” he says. “The whole world.”

* * *

Nate looks at all of them long and hard, and tells them they have a way out. “You can walk away,” he says. “You can always walk away.”

They don’t, of course. Not now. They promised they’d change together. And in the months to come there’d be stories all over the world of Leverage Consulting and Associates and what they did, some real, some fake. The fake stories will help them more than anything, really -- stories of Hardison breaking out of the coffin with his bare hands, Parker beating the Steranko herself, Eliot knocking out an entire paramilitary division with a piano wire and a can of Red Bull. (Maybe that last one’s a little true.)

But no-one will ever know what it felt like, in that dark, warm room above Bridgeport, sipping coffee and going over last-minute plans, calling in favours, contacting next of kin, when Nate placed two hands on the table and looked up, his eyes narrowed. Dear God, he’s lost and found so much: his family, his wife, his way.

It’s all come down to this.

“Let’s go steal death.”

**Author's Note:**

> find me, as always, on [tumblr](http://kanthia.tumblr.com/)!


End file.
